


Names

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: America itself may or not be a character, M/M, Soulmate AU, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 21:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4034455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name on Steve's wrist is only the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Names

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to write crack (because Steve Rogers with AMERICA on his wrist is too good to pass up) but because Steve Rogers is involved there were feelings and then it ended sappy. Fuck. Not a proper soulmate au.

Steve stared at his wrist in disbelief. He’d never believed that this would happen for him. Most everyone had said that he was too little, too sickly, too unlikely to survive long enough for a mark to manifest.

But there it was in shimmering, liquid letters right across the veins of his wrist. His soulmate. His one and only:

AMERICA

His soulmate … was America. And that was a strange name, but he could wait. Wouldn’t stop him from living his life, but he’d keep his eyes open for the person with the funny name and maybe when they met they’d like each other. He’d heard many, many stories of soulmates meeting and finding themselves incompatible, heartbroken, sometimes toxic.

 

When he stumbled out of Erskine’s machine, after a vivid, explosive chase across Brooklyn, as the dust settled, he looked down at his huge wrist almost as an afterthought. He ran his thumb over the letters, dug his nail in, watched them shift and fade and then brighten as he pulled his thumb away.

  
Then he went to see what was happening in the lab.

 

When he was on tour, well, he kept his wrist covered as much as possible. It was embarrassing. And he was starting to wonder if it wasn’t a sign. Maybe … And then he would stop himself, because AMERICA was a person, had to be. He refused to believed that he’d been preemptively hitched to the entire damn country just because he’d agreed to slap on some tights and a flimsy shield.

 

But the very strangest thing of all was the … other names. He’d heard of more than one name manifesting, or one name overtaking another, but he was starting to feel like one giant tattoo. To say that it was a shock one day to find Bucky’s name across his throat, over his pulse, while he was trying to shave, that was an understatement. But not a surprise. When Peggy’s appeared trailing down his sternum, letters growing ever smaller until the last few were illegible, he laughed, dazed. And that was it for a while.

  
But soon enough the names began to appear again. He was proud to wear the names of his men across his back, but he couldn’t guarantee how they’d feel about it. Still, there was no way for them not to see it eventually - and eventually turned out to be very soon, actually – and they all sobered pretty quickly, moved beyond words until Gabe coughed and Dugan belched and Dernier told what Steve half-translated to be an extremely filthy, rude joke at the expense of the entire Third Reich, freshwater fish, and decency in general.

The names never stopped. He’d wake up and find more. When he was injured, they would return within a day of his healing; and sometimes the names would be different.

Sam Wilson was the first name to show up that didn’t shimmer, just lay dull and unmoving against the skin of his collar, and Natasha Romanoff was the second, somewhere at the base of his spine. Monty had told him about that one while he was bent over tying his boots. It had been awkward.

Thor was bright, luminous, on the sole of his foot, and even Steve had to laugh at that one. The laughter was not entirely calm.

Sharon Carter on the crook of his arm, nestled beside where the straps of the shield rested, and he asked Peggy if she had a sister, and she said no.

The Commandos stopped pointing out the new names around the time they started appearing for a few days and disappearing, sometimes reappearing in different places and sometimes never surfacing again.

But AMERICA never went away, even after he stopped really seeing it.

 

It made sense, once he met the Avengers in the future, why their names had had a lifeless quality on his skin. They hadn’t been born yet. The moment he met Natasha and shook her hand, a spark tickled his fingers and he thought he felt an itch at the base of his spine, right over her name. A quick look in the mirror later showed that her name had awoken, come alive, and was thrumming wildly.

 

When he met Sam Wilson, though he didn’t yet know his name, he felt the telltale twitch of muscle and knew, just knew, that this man was important. The ink in his skin glowed brighter and the shine never quite dulled the way the others would after a while.

 

So maybe it’s not soulmates, he supposes. It’s people he’s destined to meet, people who will have an impact on his life and him on theirs. People who will leave their mark on him, one way or another.

Except the AMERICA one, which he keeps covered at all times, because he’s not sure he could handle the teasing without straining a few relationships.

Naturally Sam finds it. He finds all of them, with hands and lips and tongue, fascinated by the miles of legacy left on Steve’s skin. And he laughs his ass off, but afterward, once he’s soothed Steve’s ego, wrapped in Steve’s arms the way he pretends doesn’t interest him, but he can never get enough of; well, maybe, he supposes, it just makes sense.

“But why me?” Steve feels compelled to ask. “Plenty of people have meant a hell of a lot more to this country. Made an impact on way more people. I’m not special. I’m just well-publicized.”

Sam shrugs, sinking deeper into Steve’s hold. “You do have a way of getting under the skin, you know.”

Steve rolls his eyes.

 

So he never finds out what’s up with the tattoos, why he bears the marks of so many, who some of the names even are, but as the years pass they start to fade, until only a handful remain in stark contrast, those closest to his heart, those running parallel to his bones to give him strength.  
And that one that started it all. He doesn’t cover it anymore.


End file.
